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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
A. Perevezentsev, J. Hemmerich
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 797-800
Hydride and Storage | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22694
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Storage of tritium in the form of metal hydride is a common technique in tritium handling facilities and is generally acknowledged as the only option for the storage of large tritium inventories in future fusion reactor applications. Since accounting for large inventories by the conventional TPVC (Temperature, Pressure, Volume, Concentration) is very cumbersome, it is highly desirable to perform accounting directly by the application of calorimetric methods, for example based on monitoring of temperature rise in the tritium storage container caused by heat of the tritium decay (1.95W/mol.T2). Following an earlier evaluation1 of the JET tritium storage containers by electrical simulation of heat of the tritium decay the viability of the method was proven by adiabatic calorimetry with known tritium inventories up to ≈5900TBq.
